Why Do Online Communities Require 10 Day Old Accounts And 100 Karma To Post? What Parents Should Know
Last Tuesday, I was folding the week’s soccer practice laundry when my 13-year-old Jax leaned over my shoulder, phone held out like it held a personal offense. The screen had a gray error box, the text bright and clear: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma. He’d spent three months building a 4-foot Hogwarts MOC (that’s a my-own-creation Lego set, for the uninitiated) and edited 20+ photos that morning, ready to share with the 2 million people in the r/LEGO MOCs subreddit. He’d saved up allowance for a custom printed brick with his username, for crying out loud. This wasn’t just a post, it was his debut.
“Why do they even care? I’m not a robot. I just want to show my thing,” he said, scowling. I remembered that exact feeling. When I was 14, I made a Reddit account to post my Lord of the Rings fanart, got hit with the same rule, and threw a mini fit on the couch because I thought the whole community was just a bunch of gatekeepers who hated new people. I’d almost deleted the app entirely before a random user explained what the rule was for.
So I sat down next to him on the living room carpet, laundry forgotten, and pulled up the subreddit rules side by side with his account. I didn’t jump straight to explaining the rule first, I just said, “It does suck. You worked for three months on this, and you’re ready to show it off. That frustration makes total sense.” He nodded, still scowling, so I kept going.
Most parents I’ve talked to who run into this rule do one of two things, both not great. Either they tell their kid “it’s just dumb internet, don’t waste your time on it anyway,” which dismisses whatever project the kid cares about as unimportant. Or they pull out their own 10-year-old account with 10k karma and post the project for the kid, which skips the whole point of the kid joining the community in the first place. I’ve done both of these things with smaller online issues before, so I get why people do it. But this time, I realized the 10 day/100 karma rule isn’t just arbitrary gatekeeping, it’s actually a pretty good low-stakes lesson for kids learning how online communities work.
The rule exists to stop bots and bad actors, plain and simple. Spammers make hundreds of new fake accounts every single day to post scam links, hate speech, or stolen art. New accounts don’t have a history, so moderators can’t tell the real people from the fakes until they’ve been around a little and participated. The 10 day wait stops bots that are made and used the same day to spam. The 100 karma requirement means you’ve actually interacted with other people enough that you’re almost certainly a real person, not a bot. It’s not there to make new people jump through hoops for fun, it’s there to keep the community from getting overrun with garbage that moderators would have to spend 12 hours a day deleting.
I explained that to Jax in plain terms, no jargon. Then we figured out what we needed to do to hit the requirements. 10 days is just 10 days, that’s going to pass no matter what. The 100 karma sounded like a lot to him, but we broke it down: karma is just an upvote someone gives you when they like what you said. If he left two specific, nice comments on other people’s MOC posts every day, we’d hit 100 way before the 10 days were up. I told him instead of just commenting “cool,” say something specific, like “I’ve been trying to figure out how to do a moving staircase for my own build, how did you get it to work?” That’s the kind of comment people notice and upvote, because it’s real.
Jax was still annoyed, but he agreed to try. The first three days, he got a handful of upvotes a day. By day seven, he’d hit 87 karma. He started looking forward to checking his comments after school – he got a tip for the faulty roof on his Hogsmeade addition from a guy who’d built a similar MOC, and he fixed it the next weekend. By the time the 10 days were up, he had 121 karma.
He posted his MOC that night. It got 1,300 upvotes, three people asked for the instructions, and he taped a screenshot of the top comment (“This is the best custom Hogwarts I’ve seen all year”) to the fridge next to his soccer participation trophy.
I still think it’s a little silly that he had to wait 10 days to post something he worked so hard on. It’s not a perfect system, and sometimes new users with real projects still get frustrated for no reason. Last month, my niece got hit with the same rule when she tried to post her first pottery to a craft community, and she almost gave up entirely because she thought no one wanted her there. It takes a little guiding to get past the initial frustration.
But for us, it worked out better than if he’d been able to post right away. He didn’t just drop his project and leave – he participated, got to know a few people in the group, and learned that the rules people put in place aren’t always just to be mean. I tell other parents about this when they complain about the same error message popping up on their kid’s phone, and the steps we used that worked. First, name the frustration instead of brushing it off – that small step keeps kids from shutting down and not coming to you with online problems later. Second, explain the rule in plain terms, don’t just say “that’s how it is.” Third, break the 100 karma into small, daily chunks instead of making it feel like a huge mountain to climb. And don’t jump in to fix it for them by posting from your own account – that takes away the chance for them to learn how to engage with the community they want to join.
It’s still annoying, even when you know why it exists. There are some days Jax complains about it still, when he has a new build he’s ready to share. But he knows how it works now, and he’s learned to plan ahead. I don’t think this one small experience changed his whole life, but it’s been a useful little lesson. Some of the most annoying hoops we have to jump through online aren’t just there for no reason – they’re there to keep the spaces people love safe, and that’s a lesson that sticks better when you learn it first-hand, than when I just tell it to you.
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